Pages

Saturday, 31 August 2013

These
days, months seem to go by really fast. It feels like I only wrote
July’s monthly round-up a few days ago, but here we are at the end
of August. It was an interesting month
and fairly productive for me on the blog—apart from the past
week, when a hectic schedule kept me from making as many updates as I
would have liked. It was the best month ever for views though, with more than twice as many people visiting the site than in the previous best-ever month!

The
month opened with the BBC announcing that Peter Capaldi would be stepping into the role of the twelfth Doctor
after Matt Smith leaves in this year’s Christmas special. As with
all new Doctor announcements, this one was met with lots of praise
and just
a little bit of criticism,
some justified, some
not-so-justified. As
happy as I am with the choice (and I do believe he will be a great
Doctor), I had to admit to a couple concerns with the
casting process myself. More exciting news came a couple of weeks
later with the announcement of the discovery of a lost William Hartnell interview.
It’s not quite the discovery of lost episodes, but a significant
event nonetheless. Also, for a bit of fun, Doctor Who
fans discovered that the TARDIS is on Google Maps.
Finally, I have begun my own preparations for the upcoming 50th
anniversary of Doctor Who
by looking back at my own experiences
with the show throughout my life. Each week until the anniversary,
I’ll look at one of the Doctors, and finally at the spin-offs. It’s
a little bit of self-indulgent nostalgia, and I hope people enjoy it.

Although
no one’s actually enquired about it, it occurred to me that people
might wonder why I review the player’s guides for adventure paths
at the end of the adventure path and not at the beginning, which is
when the guides are released. This is because there have been
legitimate criticisms of past player’s guides that they don’t
adequately prepare players for the entire adventure path, leaving
players with characters unsuited for sudden shifts that occur later
in the adventure path. As such, I leave reviewing the guides until
after all the adventure path’s instalments are out so that I can
evaluate how well the guides prepare players for the whole
experience.

Last month, I included a
couple of very brief reviews with my monthly round-up, and I’d like
to include another such one this month. With every adventure path
Paizo has published, they have also published a map folio to go along
with it. Early ones were just a collection of important maps from the
adventure path, but later ones have been a selection of full-colour,
poster maps that are useful for the adventure path but can
have more generic uses as well. Since these folios are published in
the Pathfinder Campaign Setting
line rather than the Pathfinder Adventure Path
line, they need to be useful to people who get the one and not the
other. It’s also nice not to have to get a set of maps you already
have. I don’t normally review the folios since they are just maps
and I haven’t felt I could give them the in-depth coverage I like
to include in my reviews.

The
Reign of Winter Poster Map Folio
contains three poster maps: one of the country of Irrisen, one of its
capital Whitethrone, and one of the region of Iobaria. Each map is in
a somewhat different style, with the map of Irrisen being the most
visually stunning. In many ways, it’s more like a piece of art than
a map, and indeed, it’s perhaps not the most useful map as a
result. Still, it show the locations of sites throughout the country,
and would work especially well as a representation of a map that
people actually living in the game world might see and use. The other
two maps are more typical of
the gaming maps of
most use to gamemasters. There was a poster map of Whitethrone in the
City Map Folio
from a few years ago, but the one here is larger and more detailed.
Overall, the Reign of Winter Poster Map Folio
contains three good maps that will be useful to people running games
in the northern reaches of Golarion.

A
couple months ago, I listed
some of the most unusual search terms people had used to find their
way to this blog. Since then, I’ve collected a few more. These ones
aren’t quite as bizarre and it’s easy to see why this site might
show up as a result, but they made me chuckle. As before, all
spelling and grammar errors are replicated exactly:

girls
withdigtits – I really want to know why porn searches bring people
to my blog. Could it be because the word sexism
shows up here and that has sex
in it and thus, porn? Or just because?

sarah
jane smith hot – I understand the sentiment, but it seems an odd
search to me.

of
dice and men sexism doctor who – This is clearly a direct search
for this site with either a typo or a misremembering of the blog’s
name. Either way, the error is rather ironic.

sexist
doctors nowadays – I have no idea what to say.

children
girl doctor things – Still don’t know what to say.

left
4 dead original character models – Until this very sentence, I have
never once mentioned Left 4 Dead on this blog. I don’t play video
games these days (mainly because, if I do, I know I’ll never
accomplish anything productive ever again) and so I barely ever
mention them on this blog, if ever. No idea why Of Dice and Pen came
up in this search.

On
Saturday, 23 November, 1963, Doctor Who
aired on BBC television for the very first time. Twelve weeks from
today, it will be Saturday, 23 November, 2013—fifty years to the
day after that original airing, and the show is still going strong.
It’s had its ups and downs, of course, including sixteen years
during which only one new television production aired. But even
during that time, it continued in other forms. Doctor Who
is the world’s longest-running science fiction television series,
and also holds the Guiness World Record for most successful sci-fi
series in the world. It has become an enduring icon of British
television, and in recent years, has achieved phenomenal success in
the rest of the world as well. According to a recent international
trailer for the 50th anniversary, the show has over 77 million fans
worldwide, a number that seems to be continually growing.

Doctor
Who has also had a huge effect
on me throughout my life, both growing up and as an adult. While
other TV shows—many of which I fondly remember,
while others lie
forgotten—come and go, Doctor Who
lives on constantly in my mind and thoughts. It has shaped me in very
perceptible ways. I became a full-fledged fan at the age of ten, but
I was well aware of the show for years before that—scared stiff of
it, yet somehow intrigued and drawn to it.

In
recognition of all this and of its upcoming 50th anniversary in
November, I’d like to take a look back at my own history with the
show. A couple of years ago, when I wrote my review
of The Sarah Jane Adventures episode “Sky”,
I also wrote about my introduction to Doctor
Who.
Last year, on the 49th anniversary, I mentioned that I might write
a more detailed account of it this year. Well, that’s what this
is—and more. Over the next twelve weeks, I’m going to examine my
life with Doctor Who
one Doctor at a time, one per week, and then on the final week, a
look at the spin-offs and expanded universe. I will look at my
earliest childhood memories of the show, how and when I fell in love
with it, and all the way up to my current experiences and how I
struggle with loving a programme that I now find so problematic. Of
course, my exposure to Doctor
Who
wasn’t in order. After all, the show is older than I am. However,
the Doctor is a Time Lord. He doesn’t have to do things in order,
so neither do I. So I will look at the Doctors in order, even though
it’s not in the order of my life. It just seems fitting somehow. So
naturally, I begin with the first Doctor, William Hartnell.

While
dragons are a hallmark of fantasy gaming (they are even present in
the name Dungeons & Dragons, from which the Pathfinder game
derives), they have surprisingly not featured much in Pathfinder
adventures—at least not as the central focus. They have appeared in
numerous adventures, but usually only as encounters along the way, or
servants of the main villain. Into the Nightmare Rift, the fifth
part of Shattered Star,
had a draconic villain, but that dragon was not the central villain
of the entire adventure path. However, dragons couldn’t remain in
the shadows forever and a couple of recent non-adventure
products—Dragons Unleashed
and the Dragonslayer’s Handbook—have
focused on dragons, and in The Dragon’s Demand by Mike
Shel, a dragon finally gets to be the central villain of an epic
adventure.

The
Dragon’s Demand is the latest
in the Pathfinder Modules
series, but it is also the first in a brand new format for the
series. Previous adventures have been 32 pages in length, but this
doubles the count to 64. From here on, Pathfinder Modules
will be this longer length, but will be released at a reduced rate.
AndThe Dragon’s Demand
starts the new format off in style with an adventure designed to take
characters from first level all the way to seventh! Yet the higher
page count doesn’t just allow for a longer adventure; it also
allows for greater detail and background. The Dragon’s
Demand is practically a
mini-campaign, complete with a fleshed-out town and numerous smaller
quests that the PCs can complete along the way. The adventure will
work great for players looking for a short campaign that will last
more than just a couple sessions, but will not go on for years (like
an adventure path potentially can), and it will also work great as
the triumphant start to a longer campaign.

Thursday, 22 August 2013

When
players sit down to create characters for an adventure path, it helps
to have an idea what the adventure path is about and what kinds of
characters will best fit in. After all, if you create a swashbuckling
pirate character and the campaign ends up set entirely in a desert
without a sailing ship or water in sight, you might be just a little
disappointed. The campaign will likely end up not being much fun as a
result. With some adventure paths, this is more of a concern, as they
have specific themes or centre around specific locations. This is why
there’s a player’s guide to accompany each adventure path.

Reign of Winter is a very
linear adventure path. One event leads into the next in a somewhat
preordained manner, and given its constant movement from one location
to the next, there’s not a lot of opportunity for the PCs to stop
and do their own thing. There’s certainly no opportunity for side
quests. For this reason, characters need to be well-suited for what’s
ahead, and their backgrounds need to reflect their abilities
(although there are otherwise very few restrictions on appropriate
character backgrounds and origins). The Reign of Winter Player’s Guide
helps players create such useful characters, and it accomplishes this
quite admirably.

Tuesday, 20 August 2013

It
has all been in preparation for this. The player characters have
travelled to exotic lands and distant worlds, all to find and free
Baba Yaga and put an end to the eternal winter that threatens to
engulf all of Golarion. They have finally found Baba Yaga, but in
order to free her from her prison they must complete a series of
trials and face her daughter, Queen Elvanna, who desires
her mother’s power for herself.

The Witch Queen’s Revenge
by Greg A. Vaughan brings to a close Reign of Winter,
which has been a very ambitious adventure path. It has involved a few
aspects that some people may not fully like mixed with their fantasy
(a little bit of science fiction and some modern-ish technology), but
it has done so in often brilliant ways. This final adventure has the
unenviable task that all final adventure path volumes have: that of
bringing all the loose ends together and tying them off in a
satisfying manner, while simultaneously providing a fun and exciting
adventure in its own right. For the most part, The Witch
Queen’s Revenge manages this
wonderfully. It’s an excellent adventure, albeit a touch
railroaded, and its final resolution could potentially frustrate some
players. There are a couple other issues as well, and as such, it’s
not the best of the entire adventure path (that honour definitely
goes to Rasputin Must Die!),
but it’s far from a weak adventure and it finishes off what has
been a truly excellent adventure path overall.

Friday, 16 August 2013

These days, we're pretty used to seeing interviews with actors who have played the Doctor or other roles on Doctor Who. And not just the current Doctor and companions. Previous Doctors and companions continue to get interviewed regularly about their time on the programme. It's also pretty easy to find and watch past interviews with the actors while they were still on the show, or after they left, or even during the "wilderness years" of the nineties.

This is true of all the Doctors but one. Until now, no interviews with William Hartnell, the very first Doctor, have survived. But news has now broken that an interview with Hartnell from 1967 has been uncovered. Richard Bignell, a member of the Doctor Who Restoration Team (the team responsible for the restoration of Doctor Who episodes for the DVD releases), actually made the discovery a couple of years ago, but the announcement has been held back for the interview's appearance on the forthcoming DVD release of "The Tenth Planet", William Hartnell's final story as the Doctor (this release will also feature an animated reconstruction of the missing final episode, using the existing soundtrack). Bignell describes the discovery (via the Doctor Who News Page):

A few years ago, I was doing research into the article I was preparing for Issue 3 of Nothing at the End of the Lane
on Hartnell's rather disastrous performance as Buskin the Fairy Cobbler
in the pantomime Puss In Boots, which toured around four different
venues in December 1966 and January 1967, just three months after he had
completed work on The Tenth Planet.

Whilst doing some work at the BBC Written Archive Centre, I checked the
respective Programme-as-Broadcast sheets for the period, looking
specifically at the local BBC news programmes to see if Hartnell's
appearance in panto was deemed worthy of a television report.

He was in fact interviewed twice. Once in the first week of the tour in
Ipswich (shown on Look East on 27th December 1966) and again during the
final week in Taunton for Points West, shown on 17th January 1967. As
I'd built up some contacts in the BBC's regional news libraries working
on the DVDs, I dropped the respective archives a line to see if there
was any chance the two interviews survived.

The first interview for Look East had long gone, but the ladies in the
Bristol News Library very quickly got back to me to say that the
interview done in Taunton still survived. We arranged for the footage to
be sent over to London, where it was duly transferred. It shows
Hartnell in his dressing room doing his make-up for one of his
performances, with his "Doctor's ring" on the table and a Berwick Dalek
playsuit stuffed in the corner. Hartnell speaks about his problems
acting against the Daleks and how pantomime isn't "legitimate" theatre!
Enjoy!!

There have been all kinds of rumours going around lately about missing Doctor Who episodes having been found, but with no confirmations. While this isn't a lost episode, it's still an exciting find, and I look forward to watching the interview when it's available. "The Tenth Planet" DVD will be released in the U.K. on November 18. There is not yet an official release date for North America, but the DVDs are usually released in fairly close proximity, so we should expect it within a couple weeks of the U.K. release.

Thursday, 15 August 2013

Now
that the dragons have been unleashed,
it’s time to train, gather equipment and supplies, and set out to
slay them! For those in need of a few tricks of the trade to help
them slay a dragon, there’s the Dragonslayer’s Handbook. This Player
Companion book provides players
with background information on dragons, new feats and archetypes
focused on dragonslaying, new spells, new equipment, and more.

There’s
no denying that the Dragonslayer’s Handbook
is a bit of a niche product. It’s geared towards player characters
who intend to make a career out of slaying dragons, and many of the
abilities and archetypes won’t see much use unless the campaign
features dragons quite regularly. As such, the book may not be of
great value to many games. However, those games that do focus more
heavily on dragons will find much to benefit from in the book. There
are some very nifty new options in here, including a whole new
category of equipment called dragoncraft items, along with the
aforementioned feats, spells, etc. That’s also not to say campaigns
that only feature dragons occasionally can’t gain any benefit from
the book. Dragoncraft items can easily show up in any campaign, as
can the other equipment and many of the spells. It will just have
lower utility in such cases.

Like
most Player Companions,
the Dragonslayer’s Handbook
opens with an overview of its topic, providing what is considered
common knowledge about dragons (information that doesn’t require a
Knowledge check to know). This includes basic information about the
ten most well-known types of dragons (the five chromatic and five
metallic). It then goes on to advise how best to prepare to slay a
dragon and provides a few equipment kits that may be useful. Next up
is information on typical dragon lairs, including forest, march,
mountain, underground, and underwater lairs.

Tuesday, 13 August 2013

There is a police box on Earl's Court Road in London. If you follow this link to the Google Maps streetview of the location and then click on the double arrows in front of the police box, you can take a virtual tour of the TARDIS! It contains a detailed 360-degree view of the console room and TARDIS controls.

The above link apparently doesn't work if you're signed up for the beta version of the new Google Maps, but you can go directly into the TARDIS with this link.

Monday, 12 August 2013

A
little over a week ago, when Peter Capaldi was announced as the
twelfth Doctor, there was a lot of celebration and cheering across
Doctor Who fandom. And for
good reason. Capaldi is a brilliant actor, and I have no doubt he
will make an amazing Doctor. However, amidst all the praise and
adulation has been some criticism and negativity. There have even
been some rather baseless and silly criticisms. This isn’t really
anything new. Doctor Who
fans can be hard to please sometimes, and there are typically
vehement complaints with every new Doctor, from Christopher
Eccleston’s leather jacket not being Doctor-ish enough to Matt
Smith being too young—an interesting one given that some people are
now calling Peter Capaldi too old. However, there is one criticism of
Capaldi’s casting that is gaining a fair amount of voice and it’s
actually quite valid.

To
be fair, it’s not actually a criticism of Peter Capaldi himself,
and I’ll reiterate that I think he’s a great choice for the role.
I’m excited to see his portrayal. Indeed, I can’t wait! The
criticism is directed more towards the process itself and the people
who make the decision, people like Steven Moffat and the other senior
members of the production crew. The simple fact of the matter is that
Peter Capaldi is the twelfth white man in a row to play the role,
thirteenth if you count John Hurt. There has never been a person of
colour in the role or even—gasp!—a woman. And lots of peoplehavenoticed.
(Just as a bit of shameless self-promotion, this Jezebel
article on the topic even mentions me by name!)

I
can almost hear the groans from some people now. Why does it matter
whether Capaldi is white or not? All that matters is whether he’s a
good Doctor. The role should go to the best choice, regardless of the
colour of the actor’s skin. And yes, this is ideally true. And it
really doesn’t matter that Capaldi himself is white. However, what
does matter is that all
the Doctors have been white. If casting were truly colour blind, if
everyone truly had an equal chance and the part always went to the
person best suited for the role, wouldn’t we logically expect a bit
more of a racially diverse group playing the Doctor? It’s simple
statistics. This becomes more and more true the more Doctors there
are, as the sample size becomes larger. The U.K. is a pretty racially
diverse place and there are lots of non-white actors there, but none
of them ever land the role of the Doctor*. Now, to be fair, the
political climate back in the 60’s and 70’s pretty much ensured
that the early Doctors would all be white, but this is the 21st
century now and all four 21st century Doctors (five including Hurt)
have been white. It really is overdue time to get rid of these
ingrained biases that still permeate our lives and media, as this is
a problem that extends well beyond Doctor Who.

Dragons
are an iconic part of fantasy. Massive, winged lizards that breathe
fire (and sometimes other things like cold or poison gas), they
inspire both awe and
fear. Naturally, they are an iconic part of fantasy roleplaying as
well. The original fantasy roleplaying game, Dungeons and Dragons,
even has them in its name. As a game that developed out of D&D,
Pathfinder, too, features dragons. Each Bestiary
has included several types of dragons and dragon-like creatures, and
other books have introduced a few other varieties as well.

Perhaps
a little surprisingly, however, Pathfinder has done very little with
dragons so far. Early on, there was the 3.5 supplement, Dragons Revisited, which looked
at the ten core chromatic and metallic dragons and introduced the
history of dragons in Golarion. Since then, dragons have occasionally
shown up in adventures, but rarely as a principal antagonist. There
hasn’t even been an adventure path yet that has a dragon as its
central villain. Apart from the new kinds of dragons in the various
Bestiaries, dragons
have barely put in an appearance at all since the Pathfinder
Roleplaying Game was released. In the last couple of months, however,
there has been a little boost in dragon-related products, starting
with Dragons Unleashed(which I am reviewing here), as
well as the Dragonslayer’s Handbookand the adventure
module The Dragon’s Demand
(both of which I will be reviewing in the coming days and weeks).
Where there was once very little, there is suddenly quite a bit.

Dragons
Unleashed is very different from
Dragons Revisited, and
so people shouldn’t think that it is just a rehash of that earlier
product. It doesn’t follow the format of the Revisited
line of books, which look at the ecologies of various types
of creatures. Instead, Dragons Unleashed
presents fifteen specific
dragons with their history, personality, complete stats, lair, and
treasure hoard. The dragons are of various different kinds, not just
the standard chromatic and metallic dragons (black, blue, green, red,
white, brass, bronze, copper, gold, and silver), and cover a range of
power levels. Of course, being the powerful creatures that dragons
tend to be, the majority of dragons in this book have challenge
ratings in the double digits. In fact, there is only one entry in the
book (technically three dragons—the Brazen Clutch, all described
together in one entry) with a CR below 10. The most powerful dragon
in the book has a CR of 25 and many of the others have CRs in the
high teens and low twenties.

Thursday, 8 August 2013

When
people think of fantasy, they tend to think of wizards and dragons
and other mystical things. These are what make it fantasy, the things
that separate it from reality. But at the same time, people also
think of castles and knights on horseback, things that actually exist
(or have existed) in the real world. For fantasy to work well, it
requires something people can relate to. If everything is unreal, it
becomes harder to suspend disbelief, an important requirement of any
fiction, but even more so with fantasy. As such, the trappings of
mediaeval Europe—the castles, knights, kings, and queens—take the
role of the familiar and the normal, allowing the fantastic to
achieve its potential.

Funnily
enough, castles don’t actually make much sense in most fantasy
worlds. Castles were developed as a means of defence—against forces
that didn’t have the capability of flight. But in a world with
flying creatures and wizards casting spells, invaders can easily
bypass castles’ walls, and once that’s done, most of the castles’
defences are for naught. Yet this is something we, as an audience of
fantasy, conveniently overlook. We either don’t notice it at all,
or we shrug our shoulders and decide we don’t care. Castles provide
a specific feel. They’re a link to the real world. It doesn’t
matter whether they’re truly realistic or not.

In
fantasy roleplaying, castles are just as iconic. A castle can be a
base of operations for the player characters or a site where they
adventure and explore. Villains might lair in a great fortress, or a
castle might be the home of the benevolent rulers of the land.
Castles certainly abound in various places across the Pathfinder
campaign world of Golarion. Castles of the Inner Sea takes a look at
six specific castles from across the continent of Avistan, complete
with maps, overviews of each castle’s history and denizens, and a
specific adventuring location within each castle.

Sunday, 4 August 2013

Earlier today, before the big announcement, I was talking with my wife and some friends about who the new Doctor might end up being. I mentioned that Peter Capaldi had been a press favourite for the last several days and that I thought he would make a superb Doctor. However, I also declared that there was pretty much zero chance that he would actually turn out to be the new Doctor.

Well, as most people probably already know, I was utterly wrong there. I was not able to watch the live show of his announcement due to other commitments (to be honest, even if I could have, it was all a bit too pomp-and-circumstance for my tastes), but I was able to check briefly on-line shortly after the announcement to find out the degree of my error. And I am suitably humbled.

Seriously though, I do think Peter Capaldi is an excellent choice. I haven't seen much of The Thick Of It, the show he's probably most well known for, but the small bits I've seen of his performance have impressed me. However, he absolutely blew me away in Torchwood: Children of Earth. His performance as Frobisher is one of the things that makes that miniseries one of my all-time favourite things ever. I think Capaldi could do amazing things in the role of the Doctor and bring it a gravitas that we haven't really seen since Christopher Eccleston (provided the scripts are decent, that is).

I'm really glad to see an older actor chosen for the part again. I wrote a couple months ago about what I'd like to see in a new Doctor and this was one of my criteria. Capaldi is actually about the same age (55) as William Hartnell was when he took the role back in 1963. Change is an important part of introducing any new Doctor and after two very young Doctors in a row, an older actor will help to emphasize that change.

Although Capaldi will make his debut as the Doctor at the end of this year's Christmas special, we won't really see his performance as the Doctor until sometime next year. As such, it's not really possible to judge exactly what that performance may be like. However, I am very optimistic.